The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - What good programmers worry about (News)

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

Waymo cars make bad neighbors, Leonardo Creed pulls together wisdom from Linus Torvalds & the Art of Unix Programming to conclude what good programmers worry about, Max Schmitt makes the argument that toast notifications create a bad user experience, ChartDB is a web-based database diagramming editor, Simon Tatham makes a list of code review anti-patterns & scientists confirm that 'flow state' is very much a thing.

What up nerds? I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, August 26th, 2024. Waymo is really taking off in San Francisco, but residents in the South of Market community wish they'd just take off altogether. A bunch of Waymo cars are gathering in a parking lot and honking at each other into the wee hours of the morning. Seriously. Neighbors shared videos of driverless Waymo cars filing into the lot and backing into spots, which appears to trigger honking from the other Waymos. After much negative social media and eventually press coverage, the company stated they know about the issue and are working on a fix. Much love to the dev who pulls that Jira ticket.

Okay, let's get into the news. What good programmers worry about. Leonardo Creed pulls together some wisdom from Linus Torvalds who said, Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships. Then he adds in the art of Unix programming, which said,

data is more tractable than program logic. It follows that where you see a choice between complexity in data structures and complexity in code, choose the former. More, in evolving a design, you should actively seek ways to shift complexity from code to data. Leonardo suggests the following, quote,

Start with the data. Try to reduce code complexity through stricter types on your interfaces or databases. Spend extra time thinking through the data structures ahead of time, end quote. This advice also comes from Leonardo's own experience. He says this, quote, I once worked on a project where we spent quite a while optimizing complex algorithms, only to realize that by restructuring our data, we could eliminate entire classes of problems. We replaced a 500-line function with a 50-line function and a well-designed data structure.

Not only was the new code faster, but it was also much easier to understand and maintain. End quote. In politics, James Carville famously hung a sign on Bill Clinton's wall that said, the economy, stupid, because that's what really mattered the most to get Clinton elected. In software systems,

we may need to hang a sign that says, the data, stupid. Toasts are bad, UX. Max Schmidt makes the argument that toast notifications create a bad user experience. What are toasts? One good definition I've found says, a toast is a non-modal, unobtrusive window element used to display brief, auto-expiring windows of information to a user. That sounds

right to me, but why doesn't Max like them? He says, quote, the core problem is that toasts always show up far away from the user's attention. That also sounds right to me. Max goes on to give a couple of examples and how he'd redesign the interaction so it doesn't need a toast notification. Lots of good thoughts in short form here. Check it out in your chapter data and the newsletter. ChartDB is a web-based database diagramming editor. What's cool about this open source self-hostable web app is its instant schema import. Quote, run a single query to instantly retrieve your database schema as JSON. This makes it incredibly fast to visualize your database schema, whether for documentation,

team discussions, or simply understanding your data better. End quote. They give you what they call a magic query that you take and run in your database, Postgres, MySQL, SQLite, etc., and then paste the resulting JSON into ChartDB for it to visualize. From there, you can use the interactive editor to fine-tune the schema. It also looks really nice image in your chapter data and newsletter. It's now time for sponsored news. The top five launches of Supabase launch week 12. Number five, they released log drains. So you can export logs generated by Supabase products to external destinations like Datadog

or custom HTTP endpoints. Number four, authorization for real-time broadcast and presence is now public beta. You can now convert for real-time broadcast and presence is now public beta. You can now convert a real-time channel into an authorized channel using RLS policies in two steps. Number three, bring your own Auth0, Cognito, or Firebase. This was actually a few different announcements, support for third-party auth providers, phone-based multi-factor auth, and new auth hooks for SMS and email. Number two, build Postgres wrappers with Wasm.

They released support for WebAssembly foreign data wrappers. With this feature, anyone can create an FDW and share it with the Supabase community. You can build Postgres interfaces to anything on the internet. And number one, Postgres.new, an in-browser Postgres sandbox with AI assistance. With Postgres.new, you can instantly spin up an unlimited number of Postgres databases that run directly in your browser and soon deploy them to S3. That's the top five.

According to us, head to superbase.com slash launchweek for details on everything else. And for new users to Superbase, head to superbase.com slash changelogpod for one month of Superbase Pro for absolutely free. Code Review Anti-Patterns Simon Tatham says, When a code reviewer turns to the dark side, they have a huge choice of ways to obstruct or delay improvements to the code to annoy patch authors or discourage them completely or to pursue other goals of their own. If you've only recently turned to the dark side, you might not have thought of all the possibilities yet.

So here's a list of code review anti-patterns for the dark side code reviewer who's running out of ideas. End quote. I love how Simon named each anti-pattern so it'll be easy to identify and discuss with others. These names are great. The ransom note. The double team. The catch-22.

The flip-flop. You can almost imagine what each of these means in the context of code review without even reading his explanations. But you should still read the explanations. They are so good slash bad. For example, the priority inversion. In your first code review passes, pick small and simple nits. Variable names are a bit unclear. Comments have typos in them.

Wait for the developer to fix those and then drop your bombshell. There's a much more fundamental problem with the patch that needs a chunk of it to be completely rewritten, which means throwing away a lot of the nitpick fixes you've already made the developer do in that part of the patch. Nothing says your work is not wanted and your time is not valued. Better than making someone do a lot of work and then making them throw it away. This might be enough to make the developer give up all by itself. Flow state confirmed by scientists. We all know that feeling when total absorption in an activity makes the rest of the world disappear and all its troubles with it. But did you know scientists have been studying it for years? Quote, the late Hungarian psychologist Mihaly, long last name that I won't even try to pronounce, who first coined the term flow, went as far to call it the secret to happiness.

Contrary to the assumption that we are happiest while resting, he found that the peaks often involved very high levels of mental focus. The specific activity did not seem to matter. It could be swimming, playing the violin, or performing brain surgery. What counted was the feeling of immersion and mastery. End quote. I would argue that the reason many of us enjoy programming computers is because it's an activity that easily evokes a flow state.

The world-melting result of immersion, coupled with the eventual feeling of mastery, is a hell of a drug. The linked article dives into some of the psychology and attempted scientific study of flow state. While scientists have confirmed that it's a very real phenomenon, what causes it and how to achieve it have been harder for them to nail down. Maybe they should put down the petri dish and pick up a code editor. That's the news for now, but also scan the companion newsletter for even more stories worth your attention, such as a tool that lets you execute commands on a server by sending UDP packets, a blog post titled You Are Not Dumb, You Just Lack the Prerequisites.

And a network called Nomad for building private and resilient communications platforms. If you don't get our changelog newsletter in your inbox each Monday, fix that bug at changelog.com slash news. We have some awesome episodes coming up this week. On Wednesday, Ryan Worrell from WarpStream. And on Friday, Pound to Find. The legend continues. Have a great week. Leave us a five-star review if you dig our work.

And I'll talk to you again real soon.